“Whuh?”
“Eating in the bathtub is gross,” I said.
Ginny took another bite. “Is not. They do it all the time in Northanger Abbey.”
“Yeah, but that’s different. They thought it was, like, a restorative for the nerves or something.”
“Exactly. My nerves need restoring.”
Ginny swallowed, and sloshed around some more, for emphasis. I had to laugh.
“Just don’t restore your nerves too long, or anything. Your fingers will get all pruney.”
“’Kay.”
“I hope you feel better.”
“Thanks.”
I closed the door. Some two hours later, from my place in the TV room, I heard the bathroom door open again, and the distant glug-glug of the tub draining. I remembered I sort of imagined it as a metaphorical as well as literal draining, like the water was taking all Ginny’s annoying anxieties and whooshing them away to a water-treatment plant.
As with beginnings, it is hard to know which moments to identify as catalysts of change. But over the course of that week, as Ginny repeated her hours-long-bath ritual night after night, I remember a feeling of duty taking root in me. Until then I had been as unremarkable as a fifteen-year-old girl could be, but now I had an opportunity—an obligation, really—to work hard. It would be character building; it would be essential. It required no brilliance or insight, just derring-do and commitment. And though I knew my mother and my sister would do all they could to keep us afloat, it would be mine alone to undertake.
Two
I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
And so I began to make a plan.
I did not especially know how to save money, mostly because I have never had any. Ginny had babysat for a while, and over the summer she had worked selling flowers in the farmers market on Main Street. I, having exactly the wrong personality for customer service, and no marketable skills, had mostly stayed home and begged off the occasional twelve dollars for a movie (seventeen if I wanted popcorn). But I had done some googling and read the Amazon previews of books with titles like The Money-Management Bible. I could figure this out. I could figure this out and we would never have to leave 5142 Haven Lane unless it was totally voluntary.
I got out of one of my thousands of notebooks and sat at the kitchen counter with a can of La Croix, chewing a pencil. Over at the table, Ginny was flipping index cards and muttering things about asymptotes.
“Can you keep it down?” I said. “I’m trying to save our house.”
Instead of getting quieter, Ginny started slamming each card against the table when she’d memorized it.
I didn’t even bother saying anything, because it would be counterproductive, and decided to double down on my focus. But before I had gotten out a single idea, Mom came down from the back stairs in her huge drapey dressing gown, yawning theatrically.
“Lord,” she said. “I feel like I got hit by a train.”
“Mother,” I said. “We need to save money.”
Mom rubbed under one eye. “I’m aware. Let me have some coffee, Plum.”
I grit my teeth. I loved my mother, but where Ginny Blatchley was hyperfocused on the future, Iris Blatchley seemed, on the whole, intentionally unaware that the future was coming at all. This would have to change.
“I’ve made a preliminary list,” I said, as Mom put the moka pot on the stove and snapped a burner. After about two seconds, the smell of gas wafted out into the air.
“Mom!” Ginny yelped.
“Sorry,” Mom muttered. “Pilot light must be out again.” She pulled a lighter from the pocket of her robe and flicked it under the stove grate.
I took a deep breath. “We could start by making more money.”
Mom leaned against the countertop, arms folded. “Plum, I’ve already committed to my class schedule for the year. And it’s an hour drive to campus and back. Unless I can find a job that’ll let me work two hours in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and three hours in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays—”
“Okay,” I said. “Next. We can have a yard sale.”
Mom shook her head vehemently. “No. No yard sales.”
“Why not?” I said. “We have a lot of stuff.”
“We don’t do yard sales,” she said. “Not around here.”
“Yeah,” Ginny said, having forgotten her asymptotes. “We might as well put up a big sign that says we’re broke.”
This was proving to be more difficult than I’d anticipated.
“Well,” I said. “We can minimize spending. Cut out some luxuries.”
Mom looked around the kitchen as if to say, What luxuries?
“I saw a list online.” I started writing. “No more vacations. No fancy makeup. No more highlighting our hair—”
“We don’t take vacations,” Ginny said. “Mom already cleans out the Sephora ladies for those little packets. And when was the last time any of us got highlights?”
“That reminds me,” Mom said. “Did anyone make an appointment for the dogs’ day of beauty?” Poodles need to be washed and groomed regularly because instead of fur that sheds off naturally, they have hair, almost like people. Ginny and I both shrugged.
“I mean, I’d just drop them off this afternoon,” Mom said. “But now I have the dread coffee date with Pamela Wills.”
“You’re already drinking coffee,” I pointed out.
“Yes,” Mom said. “I need coffee to steel myself for coffee.”
“Coffee costs money,” Ginny said unhelpfully.
Mom turned to me. “Take it out of my hair highlighting budget.”
“Nobody is taking this seriously!” I slammed down my pen, which scared Gizmo. He did look awfully dusty. Doug, still lying with his head down, had those crusty things under his eyes. This gave me an idea.
“Don’t bother with the appointment,” I said. “I can wash them myself.” It would save us, if memory served, two hundred dollars. Poodles are not inexpensive dogs.
“Sure,” Mom said. “Thanks, Plum.”
“Whatever,” Ginny said. “Just don’t use my shampoo.”
So that afternoon, while Ginny panicked over calculus and Mom went out for her dread coffee date, I ushered Gizmo and Doug into the first-floor bathroom, which, like all the bathrooms, had a claw-foot tub. The real estate listing had apparently described this situation as “for your convenience, a tub on the first floor,” which our father could never get over. “There’s absolutely nothing convenient about it,” he said. “It’s a perversion of the word!”
Not true, I thought, herding the poodles inward, a ragged towel draped over my arm. It was hard enough to get the dogs to follow you upstairs, let alone hop in a tub. This eliminated at least one step.
When I closed the door, Gizmo started yipping his pathetic free me yip, which got Doug all agitated, too, and then Gizmo started clawing at the door, and Doug decided to go for broke and drink out of the toilet. Also, I realized, the lip of the tub was too high for them to climb in. It was, in a word, chaos. But a chaos that would save us money.
I did a deep knee bend to hoist first Gizmo, then Doug, into the tub. I ran the water not too hot, dampened them all over, and scrubbed them with a drugstore-brand shampoo I had found in the medicine cabinet and had to assume was safe for dogs, as there was no contraindication to veterinary use printed on the label. The whole time I felt satisfyingly industrious, even a little prideful, of my savvy in eliminating a needless cost to our family. I had visions of other bootstrapping enterprises I could undertake: knitting scarves, patching jeans, darning socks, whatever that meant. We would be just fine, I knew, as I gave the dogs a thorough rubdown with the towel.
Gizmo yipped. The water was now up to the bottom of his belly.
“All right,” I said. “Fine.” I went to pull the plug in the tub. But then I realized that I had
not plugged the tub. The tub itself was plugged.
I breathed deeply, willing myself to a governess-like state of practical calm, when the water burbled. Gizmo yipped again. Doug had started to drink out of the tub. The water burbled again, menacingly.
“Mom?” I heard Ginny yell from outside the door. “Mom?”
There must have been some dog hair covering the drain, but I couldn’t get at it with the dogs both crowded in there. So, having no choice, I pulled Gizmo’s wet front legs out of the tub, then lifted his rear, covering the smiling cartoon sushi pieces on my T-shirt in water in the process.
The water burbled. Then burped. Then the tub began to moil, like its own little sinister whirlpool. My practical calm began to ebb away. I repeated the process with Doug when my sister called down again.
“Mom!” Ginny yelled. “The toilet isn’t flushing!”
Some inflections in the narrative can only be crystallized in retrospect. But then, watching the tub burp one final time and the water swoosh away ominously, I felt the shifting of the situation drilling down to my very core. I had made—through no fault of my own—a catastrophic mistake.
An emergency plumber was summoned. The three of us stood in an anxious knot as he descended to the basement, only to see him return ten minutes later with the bottoms of his uniform pants soaking wet.
“You’ve got standing water down there,” he declared. Standing water, we learned, meant water that was not only not in a pipe but also not flowing anywhere. It was, generally speaking, bad. The basement of 5142 Haven Lane was no stranger to standing water, especially during hurricane season, because it was poorly sealed due to window caulk that has not been replaced since before World War I. But as it had not rained in over three weeks, this incidence of standing water was extra bad.
“Has there been any unusual stress to the system lately?” the plumber wanted to know, pulling out a clipboard. “Anything that would be pushing a lot of water down the pipes at once?”
A strained silence, in which no one mentioned Ginny’s nightly two-hour bath with repeated tub refills.
“I’ll have to get some special equipment for this,” he went on. “When was the last time you had work done?”
Mom couldn’t remember. The plumber wrote some things on a clipboard and gave her a carbon copy.
The prognosis was not good. Our outflow valve had been overloaded and broken. We could not use the sinks. We could not use the showers. We definitely could not use the tubs. We could not even flush the toilets, unless we want the contents of said flush to contribute directly to the standing water in the basement.
“How are we supposed to shower?” Ginny was furiously incredulous, or incredulously furious, and ignoring her egg salad on wheat. We were eating sandwiches for dinner again, because sandwiches do not require running water to prepare and are almost free if you use eggs from your own hens, and sitting at the kitchen table our father had made out of a giant tree-size slice of wood, so it was not a fully symmetrical circle. Even I, usually famished, had only taken two half-hearted bites. For someone in a chicken-owning family, I do not really like eggs.
“We can’t,” Mom said. “Unless you can think of a way to shower without water going down the drain.”
“What if we put a plastic tub in there?” I offered. “So that it gathers up all the water, and then we’ll dump it in the yard.”
Ginny bugged her eyes out. “Are you kidding, Plum? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
I put down my sandwich and felt my hair, which had a distinct french-fry quality to it, and thought longingly of my last shower two whole days ago. “It was just an idea.”
“Where are we supposed to pee?” Ginny demanded.
As if in response, a honk-honk bleated outside.
“I figured something out,” Mom answered.
Ginny and the dogs and I put down our sandwiches and scrambled to the kitchen window. Outside, a lumbering truck with the words POTTY QUEEN on the side was backing its rear end into the driveway of 5142 Haven Lane.
With a look of frozen horror, Ginny turned back to our mother.
“No,” she said. “You did not.”
Mom threw up her hands. “What did you want me to do, Ginny?”
“We could put it in the backyard,” I said quickly. “So that you can’t see it from the street.”
This, of course, was ridiculous, because all the little cabins strapped to the back of the Potty Queen truck were bright green. There was no way not to see it.
“You’re going to make us pee outside,” Ginny said. “In a porta potty.”
“Gross,” I said. “Ginny, don’t call it that.”
Ginny rolled her eyes. “Cripes, what do you want me to call it, Plum? A tiny plastic house of shame?” She said the last part with a Downton Abbey accent.
“No! God!” I said. “Just don’t use those words.” The combination of the words porta and potty is the most absolutely-disgusting-slash-repugnant phrase in the English language. I suspect it’s because it forces adults and almost-adults like myself to say the word potty.
“Porta potty,” Ginny said in a half snarl. “We’re all going to have to pee in a poooorta pooootty.”
That did it.
“Shut up!” I yelled. “This is all your fault. This never would’ve happened if you hadn’t taken all those stupid baths.”
“My fault?” she said. “You’re the one clogging all the drains with poodle hair.”
My face got hot. “I’m just trying to save us money so we don’t lose our house. Because I actually think about someone who isn’t myself.”
Ginny goggled, then snapped her mouth shut.
“Well, that’s rude.”
“It’s not rude,” I said. “It’s true.” At that moment, all I wanted to do was rip Ginny’s hair right out of her dumb head.
“Girls.” Mom must have noticed the sororicidal gleam in my eye, because she pushed us apart a little. “Not now. Please.”
“But it’s her fault!” I cried. “She’s the whole reason we have to pee in a . . .” I choked. “A tiny plastic house of shame.”
“Hmph.” Ginny gave an airy sniff and stepped out of the way before I could smack her. Mom looked like she wanted to kill whichever of us would cause the least screaming. The dogs, sensing something was wrong, retreated to their refuge under the butler’s pantry table with a whimper.
I did not want to be next to my sister, and I definitely did not want to be there while they installed the (ugh) porta potty, so while Mom went outside to greet the Potty Queen delivery people, I retrieved the dogs’ leashes from where they were draped on the (fake) stuffed polar bear by the back door. The dogs, using the selective hearing that cannot compute the word sit at any volume but can hear the jingle of a leash or the tinkle of kibble falling into a dish from three floors and six rooms away, bolted right for me.
“I’m walking the dogs,” I announced. No one answered, of course. No one cares where I do or do not go.
The door slammed behind me, and after carefully maneuvering around the Potty Queen truck (which was not easy, considering the dogs thought it needed a thorough smell-inspection), I set off down Haven Lane toward Evergreen.
For late September, it wasn’t that hot out, but after about seven steps, my armpits started to feel distinctly gummy. I stopped to scoop my greaseball hair into a bun at the back of my neck, and wondered how difficult it would be to shampoo it with a hose. The dogs ambled along, smelling everything and peeing on most things, but I kept tugging them along because, for once, I had no patience. (I do not always live up to my name.) I wasn’t going anywhere particular, but I wanted to go there fast.
Practically every Victorian on our block was a historically designated house and had the same very nice sweeping lawn with azalea bushes and mountain laurel and a driveway made up of little pebbles behind a wrought-iron fence. My favorite route for walking the dogs was a two-block circuit—down Haven to Evergreen, down Evergreen to Carpenter
, and down Carpenter to Locust until I hit Haven—that kept me completely under the cover of trees. The sycamore branches that curve out over the streets and sidewalks like big leafy cathedral ceilings are probably the best nonarchitectural feature of the Haven Lane area. But by the time I reached my usual turnaround spot at Evergreen, I did not feel nearly walked-out enough, and the dogs were still sniffing, and I was already pretty sweaty and gross, so what difference would it make if I just kept going? So I went an additional block down Evergreen, and then another, until I was so far off my own usual beaten path that there were no more sycamores above me, just a velvet-blue sky and a few teeny twinkles of stars.
It was at this juncture that Gizmo decided to poop, and I, unlike some Blatchley sisters, was not going to impede the natural excretory functions of another living being, so I let the dog do his thing. Except my self-righteousness was short-lived, because I realized that in my rush to leave 5142 Haven Lane I had not brought a plastic bag with me. Panicked, I tugged on Gizmo’s leash, trying to at least get him out of the line of vision of the very nice house we were walking past, but Gizmo understandably did not want to be disturbed, and so there I stood, greasy-haired, clutching Gizmo’s leash, and hoping I could abscond under cover of darkness before anyone noticed.
But someone did notice. And called my name.
“Peach?”
Well, not my name. What this person thought my name was. Which, in turn, made me realize who the someone in question was.
I froze. Gizmo continued to poop. On the porch of 6800 Evergreen Avenue, a silhouette in the shape of a Loud Sophomore Boy leaped down the stairs. As he approached, I vowed to remain silent.
“It’s Plum,” I said. Damn.
Tate Kurokawa smiled, as far as I could tell. (It was dark.)
“I thought that was you,” he said.
“You did?”
Tate nodded. He was wearing a T-shirt, which struck me as odd, because I did not think that boys like Tate owned shirts without collars.
“What’s up?”
I looked pointedly at the crouching Gizmo.
Ordinary Girls Page 5